How badly are we being ripped off on eyewear? Former industry execs tell all

They still came out to be cheaper than Luxottica, and for something that I use for years, it ended up being worth it.

Switching to Zenni has allowed me to move to cheap CR-39 lenses rather than expensive high index material. CR-39 is soft, and if I'm paying a lot for frames then the lenses getting scratched is a Big Deal. Then pile on further costs for coatings etc. But if the frames and lenses are both inexpensive, then needing to get a new pair sooner is not really a big deal.

(polycarb is right out due to its horrible chromatic aberration. If you don't know what that is, and you're perfectly content with the clarify of things you're seeing, don't look it up lest you sensitize yourself to it!)

I still need to find a decent sunglass frame on Zenni. Their basic aviators are way too small.

I replaced my $300 walmart progressives with better for $80 and that includes shipping.

That's less than my monthly cell phone bill. It's like my glasses went from sacred to disposable.

Most high street stores do free eye tests to get you in the door. The price will be around £20, but free vouchers in papers, leaflets, in store, online, etc, are very available. You could probably just ask for a free one.

Alternatively, if you use a computer enough in your work, I believe your company is required to cover eye tests.

Lastly, but online. Get your prescription from the store and don’t buy in store. Go to somewhere like Glasses Direct, a Warburg Parker equivalent for the U.K., and buy from their own brand ranges if you can. They are typically £25-100 for frames, and almost always buy one get one free.

Between these tips, I tend to get a new pair of glasses and prescription sunglasses, with good lens coatings on both, and going for more fashionable frames, for about £120 all in (2 pairs). As a student I did this and was spending about £60, and that’s every 2 years or so as my eyes change and glasses break.

Conversely I have family who spend £250+ a pop on the high street.

Just have the user take a selfie while holding some object of known dimensions on their forehead. Like a dollar bill. Find the eyes and pupils (OpenCV can do that), find the reference object, calculate.

Then take a picture of the prescription, OCR to the numbers (which will need a really good OCR program given the handwriting of many ophthalmologists), confirm the data with the user, and take the order for new glasses. Composite a selfie with pictures of glasses so you can see them on your face.

Order from China, deliver via E-Packet, profit. Who needs Luxotica?

Perhaps they can get reimbursed by your insurance provider (without co-pay, so you don't necessarily even know about it) and/or the government, when they make glasses according to a prescription, in a way that they don't when they make them 100% for retail?

I lost a pair of plastic glasses in the Colorado River in 1992 or so, crazy to think they are possibly reasonably intact somewhere in the Pacific Ocean :|

"everything is worth what people are ready to pay"

How do you find the correction for the computer specific glass?

I have a pair for distance but it is a horror to use with computers.

There are already machines (called autorefractors) that can try to calculate your prescription. They operate on more complex principles than flipping lenses back and forth. They can provide a good starting point, but sometimes they aren't accurate.

A good optometrist can do a lot more than just give you your prescription, though. They should be checking your eyes for signs of disease, and treating things that they find. Seeing an optometrist for a checkup is preventative medicine, like regularly seeing a primary care physician or a dentist.

They still need an optometrist on-site, and they have a bunch of sample frames you can try on and order right there, and/or have sets you like sent directly to you to try on later so your partner can weigh in / you can take you time, etc.

Glasses take about a week once ordered and are typically priced such that they're fully covered by insurance. I felt like they were comparable to Warby Parker quality as well.

I was a guinea pig to give them feedback and it was VERY slick - I feel like it took only a few minutes. Way better than the A/B optometrist process and opaque and expensive frame / coatings upsell.

Anyways, apologies for sounding like infomercial - it's just they do a really good job with an upgrade on the kind of device you're talking about so I figured I'd share exactly how it works.

I feel like their main limitation is finding optometrists in new cities who are willing to "try something new" to run diagnosis events - who unsurprisingly tend to be younger doctors less invested in the legacy diagnosis model.

Zenni's fancier materials are completely lackluster (Abbe wise), and I'm curious if that's because the proprietary high index materials are really so expensive that it would be out of their market, or if Luxottica's anticompetitive behavior extends deep into the supply chain as well.

Just the lens were $55, probably because of progressives, but that's still way less than anything I've paid before.

You are the second person to mention "computer monitor" glasses so I wonder, are they the same correction as your normal glasses? I am new to wearing glasses. I have a pair I use outside, they make everything crystal clear. I love them!! But for computers they are a pain after while, so I don't use them.

As other people mention costs, I paid about $30 total for the eye exam + frame + both lenses + next day delivery (not in the US).

Now I am in the US for a while, so I can't ask for "computer monitor" glasses, but with my correction information I could try to order some from zenni or eyebuydirect.

Some of it goes to providing jobs to those same middle class people.

If you include the unwillingness to respond to demand by building enough new homes in the popular urban areas, probably a lot.

A 1000 sq.ft. home (house or condo) should not cost more than $200,000 to build. Anything above that, someone is making profit.

Many things from underwear, glasses, clothes to paper tissues are branded fashion items.

None of these items are expensive to make, we just don't buy the cheapest.. probably you can find cheap glasses somewhere online, if not there's probably a business opportunity in that :)

Question: do people want to buy cheap glasses, clothes, underwear? Or do they want to buy branded Kleenex tissues?

What I'm mostly saying is that I don't see this as rent seeking, it's just people willing to spend large amounts of money for fashion.

In terms of the impact on middle class, I think most of these markets tend to command a relatively small part of a household budget.

For the most part, price inflation is a result of and/or caused by increased spending. Complimentary optometry at the mall of your choice. Attentive salespeople standing at glass counters. Brand licensing galore. I would imagine there's a substantial corporate layer, social media coordinators... Profit too, of course. It sounds quite lucrative.

It's interesting to note that a lot of economists predicted we'd be working way less by now. Keynes is a famous example. It's interesting because the theories haven't changed much, and the assumptions keynes and others made about growth and efficiency were about right.

Modern economists generally explain this as "people had an unexpected ability to consume more." I get the impression their not entirely satisfied though.

• As a few people have pointed out, people often buy sunglasses for fashion and social signaling rather than on price. Wearing Tom Ford glasses means you're getting very good quality glasses, but mostly you are paying to wear Tom Ford glasses, in the same way that a Rolls Royce and a mid level BMW are functionally very similar, even though there is a 5x difference in price (if not a higher change). You're paying for the styling and the brand name.

• Where the money goes: for a lot of consumer brands, huge sums go into brand advertising. B2B companies spend this money on salespeople and tradeshows. I like to give the example of a Rolex. A new Rolex is worth $10-15k (if not more) because they spend tens of millions of dollars every year telling us all that that's why they're worth so much. Compare that to a lesser advertised brand - say Tag Heuer, and you'll see there's a pretty big difference in their pricing. Traditionally this money has gone into magazines / billboards / tv commercials / sports sponsorship - so this money is subsidizing middle class entertainment. On the B2B side, if you engage with a company like SAP, you'll get a professional sales team walking you through the buying process (they'll probably even spot you a few nice dinners along the way).

• "Rent seeking" is an interesting term, and while I agree with it in the context of sunglasses, it's a bit hard to nail down in a lot of the economy. Price is funny because lots of the things we produce now (particularly software, pharmaceuticals & entertainment) have revenue models that don't see much of an increase in marginal cost once you've covered the initial investment (10k people see your movie in cinemas vs 1m - provided you've got the infrastructure in place, it's not like the price of producing the movie goes up 100x).

• The culprits for the "middle class burden" is often pointed at healthcare and higher education for the simple reason that they have dramatically increased administrative costs which ultimately haven't added much (if any) value to the consumer (people argue my first point with regards to higher education - perhaps a Harvard education is worth $60k a year, although it's hard to see many other colleges worth that much for the brand alone).

No anti-trust laws of course, because those who benefit are the most loyal voters.

One third of it.

The other third is from advertising: a huge industry using all kinds of manipulation, psychological tricks, constant brain washing, and (nowadays) surveillance, to make us buy all kinds of crap we don't need, and didn't want until yesterday.

And the last third is from jobs that make the middle class so tired and give it so little time and space, that shopping feels like therapy, and giving in to rent-seeking is the only option.

If you probe further you'll realize the companies with largest margins (basically ripoffs or to use Mr Buffets's lingo 'moats') will be (are?) the ones with most resources to spare on marketing and media. so the inevitable outcome will be massive corruption of public discourse and loss of clarity for common man. sounds familiar?

Will be interesting to see what the effects of the merger with Luxxottica will be.

I feel like the frames were more of the cost than the lenses.

You are being ripped off. Look at how much of the industry they own. The only reason this hasn't been acted on yet is because people see their various brands as being separate.

If you reply: "People that don't need glasses don't get their eyes checked every 2 years for disease"

The party line will be: "People that don't need glasses are at lower risk for eye disease"

I just got a physical copy of my prescription and uploaded it to my google drive. It's 5 years expired, but I still see 20/20 and use it to purchase new frames online.

Building a machine to automate an eye exam seems obvious. But, the industry pushes back vs anything that would lower costs.

Contact lenses are regulated by the FDA.

However, this isn't an argument against automation, because human optometrists frequently get it wrong too. I agree that it should be automated.

The refraction portion of the eye exam is the least important one for medical reasons and the one that people think has the highest stakes (getting the right glasses.) The other parts of the eye exam (pressure testing, retinoscopy, etc.) are worth far more to your overall health.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorefractor

Categorical and plain wrong —

https://www.zennioptical.com/b/rimless-glasses

I wonder to what extent the presence of insurance in the mix has made things worse. Markets never work particularly well when the entity paying and the entity choosing the product aren't the same. Textbooks (vs normal books) come to mind as an obvious example of this.

Anecdata being what it is the last non-Zenni glasses I bought were from Lenscrafters and had a blurry spot they refused to acknowledge or fix and I lived with it for years.

Zenni glasses are so cheap if you get a bad pair you just buy another.

Can't comment on weight differences and so on. I haven't had a problem with the weight of the lenses w/my prescription. My wife has a very strong prescription and purchases the highest index option and she hasn't noticed a difference. Index is index and material is material so unless you are comparing apples to oranges is it actually possible for them to differ?

Regarding clarity. I get more mileage from cleaning my glasses with dish soap then I do from the optical qualities of the lens. Maybe mine get dirty faster then most.

Have had these glasses for more than a few years, have sat on them, dropped them on concrete, etc. Still going strong.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2012-05-03/recycl...